The semi-mindful spewings of some single, middle-aged white guy living in downtown Seattle.

There Are No Sides to Every Issue

One common thing I hear every single year of a presidential election is that no one is sticking to the issues. ‘The politicians aren’t talking about the issues’, or ‘the media is not airing what is important’, or my favorite ‘I just want to hear the issues and have someone lay out a plan for the future’.

GARBAGE!!!

This is NOT what the hoi polloi want.

People have many ways to access the daily news and delve into the issues they find the most meaningful. Hell, with the internet, you can easily research articles from credible sources about issues such as what is going in in Syria, our economic situation, job growth, global warming, foreign and domestic trade, race relations, etc. But this is not what the majority of people are interested in.

If it was, then we would have a completely different social and political climate. People would have interesting and thoughtful takes on the US economy, people would think deeper about ISIS and their international place in the world, and hell, people would know the faces of our politicians?

Do you know who Tim Kaine is? Do you know who Mike Pence is? Maybe YOU do, but over 50% of Americans cannot pick them out of a lineup of one.

Need proof people don’t care about issues? Look at Trump. The man has offered 1 semi-detailed plan for taxes and that is it. No more. Nothing on the battle against terrorism, nothing about trade deals (just that he is against them), nothing about education reform, not even anything about job growth (yes, his view on privatizing infrastructure development is fuzzy at best). On the other hand, Clinton has fleshed out multiple plans to attack problems of today; from domestic to international policy. You may not agree with them all, but I bet you agree with some of them. And at least they were thought out in an adult manner. But guess what? It doesn’t matter. Well, at least to over 40% of Americans it doesn’t.

People want and like rhetoric. They like to hear from someone who expresses themselves with the same feeling about issues as they do. There is no thought to any of this, just a visceral reaction that people gravitate to.

Granted, this is not everyone. I for one am not like that at all. And I bet you are not as well. You are obviously much smarter than most because you are reading this right now. But most people are not that educated on the complexity and depth of the real issues. Most like a distilled version of an issue and construct a reality about the cause and solution based on their emotional reaction to it.

So to those undecideds out there that are complaining about the lack of tackling the issues, what are you doing on your end to educate yourself?